Waiting for medical help in an unexpected situation can be one of the most stressful and frustrating experiences that patients and their loved ones go through. It’s common for individuals to feel anxious and, in some cases, exhibit violent behaviors. To help ease their minds a bit, Zuyderland, a hospital in South Limburg, decided to introduce an innovative solution to improve the patient experience.

The idea was to develop monitors that visualize the expected waiting time in the emergency room. These kinds of monitors already exist in several Dutch hospitals, so what’s so special about this solution? Zuyderland decided to go a step further and provide patients with a waiting time monitor per department specialty based on a data model, now that’s a unique and innovative feature! During the development of this solution, our Data Science expert worked closely with Zuyderland to lay the groundwork and supported them with:

The first challenge was to collect data from the SAP system and transform it in near real-time to provide up-to-date information. Next, we worked on developing a statistical model to accurately represent real-time conditions of the emergency room. This model takes into account the number of people currently in the ER to estimate how long a new patient has to wait. This step is complex because the data must be both accurate and up-to-date. There are cases where the data is not complete — for example, a patient still in the waiting room may not have all their data entered, or some essential information might not be logged until later, leading to incomplete data that must be managed. To deal with this, the statistical model is designed to set a maximum expected waiting time. This helps in setting realistic expectations for patients. Finally, in-depth knowledge of the medical domain is crucial to this project to ensure high quality data.